Use AI for drafts, not decisions
AI is great for rough drafts: outlines, first-pass product copy, alt text suggestions, headline variations, FAQ content, social caption variants. It is poor at strategic choices: who your audience really is, why they buy, what to charge, what to remove from the offer.
Treat AI like a fast junior copywriter. Give it the brief. Edit hard. Never publish what comes out without a human pass.
A prompt structure that actually works
Role. Audience. Goal. Constraints. Examples. That's the shape of a prompt that produces something usable.
Role: 'You are an ecommerce copywriter for South African small businesses.' Audience: 'A 35-year-old solo founder selling skincare on Shopify.' Goal: 'Write a 200-word product page intro for a sensitive-skin moisturiser.' Constraints: 'No hype, plain English, mention key ingredient, end with a clear CTA.' Examples: paste two product page intros you actually like.
The more specific each part is, the less editing you do at the end.
Where AI saves real time
Product page first drafts. Email subject line variants. Social caption rewrites for different platforms. Alt text generation. FAQ expansion from a list of customer questions. Ad copy variations for split testing. Outlines for blog posts you'll then write yourself.
Each of these is a job where the value is in volume and variation, not deep judgement.
Where AI quietly causes damage
Strategy. Pricing. Audience definition. Brand voice from scratch. Competitive positioning. Anything that requires real-world context the model doesn't have.
If you outsource these to AI, you end up with a generic marketing setup that looks like everyone else's. The whole point of marketing is to not look like everyone else.
A small library beats a big one
You don't need 500 prompts. You need ten that work. A product page prompt. An email welcome sequence prompt. A launch announcement prompt. An SEO brief prompt. A FAQ prompt. A social caption prompt. An ad headline prompt. A reactivation email prompt. A review request prompt. A press pitch prompt.
The Planner ships with a prompt pack built around the Role-Audience-Goal-Constraints-Examples structure for exactly these jobs, tuned for South African small businesses.
Run AI inside a system, not as a replacement for one
AI doesn't replace the marketing system in the digital marketing post linked below. It speeds it up. The system is still the audience, offer, message, channels and analytics. AI just helps you produce more drafts, faster, inside that system.
